To Israel

You have to stop the mad fundamentalist settlers stealing land, the wall building stealing land, dividing farms, the checkpoints stopping commerce, splitting communities, the tanks against stone throwing kids, the starvation, the withholding of fuel, medicine, water, electricity... No
wonder your hollow words are not heard.

You haven't got the mindset to do this, otherwise Gaza and the West bank wouldn't be as they are, but if you, and your family, all your people, were forcibly removed from their homelands by a violent invader, all because of words in a work of fiction... wouldn't you fight back? Imagine... just for a few minutes, honestly... put yourself in their place, your homeland stolen,
your family starving and ill, unsanitary conditions, shot at, check points, anger... go on, try it!

And if your body, your life, was the last thing you had to fight with, then wouldn't you use that to protect all that you hold dear? Your kids, your partner, the last remnants of your homeland?

I can't believe all this came from a UK prime minister... Churchill. Sickening. That a so called "holy" book was taken as literal truth so that a mainly European people could invade a part of the middle east that had been permanently occupied since we got out of Africa and displace the people into foul slums, chipped away at, made smaller and smaller until they're bursting at the seams, and then starved and shot at.

Disgusting... absolutely disgusting. And you wonder why they fight back with
outdated rockets and suicide bombers?

Yes, the holocaust was foul, a nauseating chapter in human history. But two wrongs don't make a right. And Israel can't do what it's doing now BECAUSE it still suffers the pain of the Nazi death camps. I'm NOT an anti Semite... i'm an atheist / humanist and what you are doing is plain wrong! I don't hate you because you're a Jew, i hate what you are doing! There's a difference, and if you won't see that difference then it's a choice YOU have made, you choose to hide behind your people's history when you should have LEARNED from your people's history.

Of all the world's people, that it should be the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust that should Ghetto-ise and murder thousands upon thousands of fellow humans is an outrage. This current pogrom against the Palestinians is no exception. Of all the worlds people i would have thought the Jews would be able to recognise the pain of others and LEARN from the atrocities
of the past.

It's just made you bitter, violent, blinkered... your forefather's suffering and your religion has rendered you blind to the suffering you're causing. As bad as Hitler? Well, ask the starving kid crying for his dead Mother in Gaza this morning as the smoke clears from your fighter jets most recent missile attack runs on residential areas and your ground troops prepare to go in with
tanks and assault rifles against "soft" targets.

Hitler's Blitzkrieg, "Lightning war" in English. It took the form of air assault to soften up the target and then mechanised troops pushing in and through... this is exactly what your armed forces are doing now. The only difference is that the Nazis had armies, air forces, navies to fight
against. Not women, children and desperate civilians formed into rag tag resistance outfits out of date, sparse weaponry. A few rockets and Kalashnikovs against your armed forces.... disgusting.

TALK! This is not a fight, it's a fucking turkey shoot. You should be ashamed of yourselves, as individuals and as a people. If those of your previous generations that didn't make it out of the camps could see what you are doing to these people they would hang their heads in disbelief and
shame.

I do to...for my own species stupidity, and the futileness of "my invisible friend is better than your invisible friend". Stupid, stupid humanity.... when will we ever fucking learn!

Radio 4 "Thought for the Day"

Please visit Pledgebank : "Thought for the Day"

"Thought for the Day" is a slot during BBC Radio 4's "Today Programme" in which airtime is handed over to religious commentators to try to interpret world events in the context of their texts and bestow their wisdom upon us all.

The fact that this interruption occurs during the BBC's flagship radio news programme, which is otherwise supposed to apply exacting standards of evidence, makes it totally and utterly incongruous. Not only is "Thought for the Day" on during this programme, but it is given absolute peak time at approximately 7.47am, just as many people are waiting for the 8am headlines and getting ready to leave for work.

In addition, the fact that humanist, non-religious contributors, are excluded from the slot gives the impression the BBC believes morality is the exclusive remit of religious people, which is offensive, unrepresentative and untrue.

As such, "Thought for the Day" is an insult to intelligent listeners. It is high time there was a concerted campaign insisting that it either:


1) accept non-religious contributors (for example A.C. Grayling)

or

2) be removed from The Today Programme's schedule all together


During the week commencing 1st January 2009 I will email the Today Programme to object to Thought for the Day in writing - but only if 100 other people do the same.

Although the Today Programme often passes the TFTD buck to the BBC "Religion & Ethics" unit (a conflation indicative of how they view matters) we will address our mails to where the problem appears: today@bbc.co.uk